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May 23, 2012

[Stories abound in Delhi
of monkeys’ entering homes, ripping out wiring, stealing clothes and biting
those who surprise them. They treat the Indian Parliament building as a
playground, have invaded the prime minister’s office and Defense Ministry,
sometimes ride buses and subway trains, and chase diplomats from their
well-tended gardens.]

NEW DELHI
— The first interloper stepped in front of her on the sidewalk and silently
held up his hand. The second appeared behind her and beckoned for her bag.
Maeve O’Connor was trapped.

Resistance would have
been dangerous, so Ms. O’Connor handed it over. The two then sauntered
arrogantly away. The whole encounter lasted no more than 15 seconds — just one
more coordinated mugging by rhesus monkeys in a city increasingly plagued by
them.

“I had other bags with
me, but they knew the bag that had the fresh bread in it,” Ms. O’Connor said.

“They were totally
silent, very quick and highly effective.”

The monkey population of
Delhi has grown so large and aggressive that overwhelmed city officials have
petitioned India’s Supreme Court to
relieve them of the task of monkey control.

“We have trapped 13,013
monkeys since 2007,” said R. B. S. Tyagi, director of veterinary services for
Delhi’s principal city government. Nonetheless, Delhi’s monkey population has
only increased.

The reason is simple:
People feed them. Monkeys are the living representatives of the cherished Hindu
god Hanuman, and Hindu tradition calls for feeding monkeys on Tuesdays and
Saturdays.

Dr. Tyagi expressed
impatience with residents who feed the monkeys one day, then complain to the
city when the monkeys steal their clothes on another day.

Dr. Tyagi’s agency has
asked the city’s wildlife agency for help, but wildlife officials claim that
the monkeys — a scourge of the city for years as urbanization has encroached on
their original habitat — are no longer wild and are thus not their
responsibility.

“This problem will never
be solved” as long as Hindus feed monkeys regularly, said R. M. Shukla, the
city’s chief wildlife warden. “We’ve issued many ads asking people not to feed
monkeys in public places.”

In 2007, a Delhi deputy mayor died when he fell
from his terrace after being attacked by monkeys, a widely publicized episode
that spurred the city to step up its efforts to move monkeys to safer
environments. Yet such attacks continue. This month a 14-year-old girl was seriously injured when
she fell from the roof of a five-story residential building after monkeys
pursued her.

“Monkeys do commonly
bite people, and their bite wounds can be extensive,” Anthony S. Fauci,
director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in
Bethesda, Md., wrote in an e-mail. “They are smart enough to often attack the
face of the person.”

While monkey bites can
lead to rabies or a fatal form of the herpes virus, documented cases are “close
to nonexistent,” Dr. Fauci wrote. Skin bacterial infections from bites are
common, however. They are treatable with antibiotics.

Stories abound in Delhi
of monkeys’ entering homes, ripping out wiring, stealing clothes and biting
those who surprise them. They treat the Indian Parliament building as a
playground, have invaded the prime minister’s office and Defense Ministry,
sometimes ride buses and subway trains, and chase diplomats from their
well-tended gardens.

Roopi Saran, a Delhi
resident, has seen monkeys steal candy from the hands of her children. And
tribes of monkeys often take over her yard, preventing her and her children
from venturing outside.

“So we sit inside our
house like caged animals, like we’re the ones in the zoo and they’re the owners
outside looking at us,” Ms. Saran said.

With the city’s trapping
program a failure, some residents are getting a bigger monkey, a langur, to
urinate around their homes. The acrid smell of the urine scares the smaller
rhesus monkeys away for weeks. But the odor is no bouquet for humans, either,
and as soon as it disappears, the rhesus monkeys return.

Amar Singh, a langur
handler, was sitting across the street recently from one of his langurs in
Delhi’s diplomatic neighborhood while his monkey systematically stripped the
leaves off a tree in the yard of well-tended home. The langur, a large monkey
with a black face dramatically framed by white fur, was tied to a pole with a
six-foot leash. Mr. Singh cautioned against getting anywhere near the animal
because “a langur’s slap is so hard, it can send its target back by five feet.”

Mr. Singh said that he
had 65 langurs urinating on prominent homes and buildings throughout Delhi. He
and his partners feed and walk each monkey during the day, but they remain tied
to their posts overnight. He charges about $200 a month.

Dr. Tyagi said langurs
simply pushed rhesus monkeys to ransack adjoining homes. The city started out
seven years ago paying monkey catchers $5 for every rhesus monkey they caught.
It raised the price to $9 four years ago, and now pays $12.

“Despite offering this
rate, there are few monkey catchers,” he said.

Years of trapping, using
cages baited with fruit and nuts, have taught the monkeys to avoid the traps.
For a time, the city hired highly professional trapping teams from the south of
India, but even they have stopped coming to Delhi, Dr. Tyagi said. Himachal
Pradesh, a northern Indian state, issued permits to kill monkeys that destroyed
crops, but the practice spurred protests and is not being considered in Delhi.

Trapped monkeys are
brought to a sanctuary in the south of Delhi, but residents who live near the
sanctuary say their lives have been ruined by the influx. Monkeys easily scale
the sanctuary’s walls and often find their way back to Delhi’s central
neighborhoods.

Kali, who lives in a
small hut near the sanctuary and goes by only one name, said her young daughter
and niece had both been bitten twice, requiring trips to the hospital and
expensive vaccinations. After being attacked while bathing, she now asks her
husband to stand guard when she washes. And for a poor family like hers, the monkeys
are a constant threat in more ways than one.

“I give them my
leftovers like roti,” she said. “But then they ran away with my onions.”